It is very important for entities to be able to track expenses. A growing portion of many entity's expenditures are related to computers, including costs for computers, peripherals, and support personnel. In the past, entities purchased or leased computers, servers, and the like on a fixed-price basis. That is, an entity would pay a fixed price for the use of a computer, regardless of how much they actually used the computer. An entity would also incur the salary costs for certain people to operate and maintain the computers and the facility costs for housing the equipment.
Recently, a trend has emerged with computing providers selling computing time on a unit basis. In a manner similar to electric companies selling electricity by the amount of electricity used, computing providers sell computing power based on the amount of computing time used. There are various benefits for the users of such a utility type pricing system. For example, entities may have fluctuating needs wherein, one week, the entity may have large computing needs, but the next they may not have large computing needs. In such a situation, under traditional pricing, the entity would be forced to buy enough computers, servers, and the like to cover their peak needs.
Under traditional pricing schemes, during slower times, the computers and servers are not used as often, but payments related to the computers still must be paid. If the entity tries to compensate by purchasing fewer or less expensive computers and servers, they may encounter the opposite problem—they may have adequate computing power during slow times, but inadequate computing power during peak times. If the entity is dependent on adequate computing power being available at all times (for example, the entity runs an e-commerce business or otherwise desires 24-hour access by customers), the lack of computing power may result in lost business to the entity. The utility type pricing scheme reduces these problems, as short-term spikes or dips in computing needs are compensated for by the resultant spike or dip in computing costs.
However, under the utility pricing scheme, it may be more difficult to plan for future costs because, for example, peak times may not always be predictable. Another reason is that it is not always easy to determine how the computing time is being spent and where it is being spent. In addition, with the integration of systems and the evolution of user interfaces, it becomes difficult for users to perceive how much processor time they are using, thus making it easier for a user to inadvertently spend too much on computing. In certain instances, computing providers using utility pricing do not separate costs per job, merely presenting a bill periodically. Therefore, an entity that has a dozen internal groups each using utility pricing may not be able to determine which groups are in need of more computing power or less computing power.
The confusion in reconciling the fees for the computing time is often compounded in a corporate environment where multiple business units have different computing needs in any given month. In these cases, and particularly given the transformation of in-house computing departments to cost centers, the in-house computing departments may want to pass along the fees to the appropriate departments within their company. In addition, these fees are often passed along within the company to the clients being served by the business. For example, a company's client may have agreed to pay for excess computing time to complete a project. In these situations, it is important that the appropriate computing charges and the appropriate fees associated with those charges be accurately reconciled and forwarded to the appropriate department or corporate client. This has been a difficult task for corporate computing departments in some instances because, under the past system, a computing department may manually collect all the fees owed by one corporate entity and forward a monthly lump sum balance owed by the corporation.
A significant amount of computing department intervention is often required to address the aforementioned issues. A computing department may manually input information to identify the fee with the appropriate computer usage. However, there is an increased human error potential and a reduction in the computing department productivity corresponding to the time spent performing this manual transaction. While other billing software products exist, these products do not typically handle fees related to computer usage and the products do not offer enhanced descriptive billing statements, and therefore the computing department receives calls from company divisions requesting additional information to help them understand, validate, and reconcile their fees. Furthermore, existing fee allocation systems lack certain features or have certain deficiencies such as, for example, they generally require manual computing department intervention resulting in poor time efficiency and increased error possibilities; they provide little to no descriptive bill detail resulting in increased corporate division confusion trying to understand their fees and expense them; they are not able to automatically charge fees for value ads, special services, or other computing services and pass the cost for these services to the corporate division; they do not have the flexibility to automatically charge only one flat fee for several computer usages related to one project because they have no user profile to work from; and they do not automatically allow the fee to be charged to an alternate or a split form of payment because they have to bill through the corporate headquarters.
With both traditional pricing models and utility pricing models, it is very important for organizations to limit costs in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. But it is also important to maintain sufficient computing power to be able to handle the variety of different tasks being performed. It is desirable for an entity to be able to more easily track past expenses and forecast future expenditures. A need also exists for billing with enhanced description for facilitating the reconciliation of the fees to the associated computing department. A need also exists for billing that avoids manually breaking out and reconciling computing department fees, and improves computing department efficiency. There further exists a need to directly, systematically, and automatically bill the fees and computing department charges to the appropriate entities.